


Escapes

by Terentia



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Elsa centric, F/M, Hans Christian Andersen| the snow queen, Infidelity, Melancholy, Mystery, Post-Canon, Sadness, Weird, fragmented, helsa, the mirror and the devil
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-24 15:29:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3773839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Terentia/pseuds/Terentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night, during a more violent attack, as she felt the ice climbing the walls in the darkness and as blood roared in her ears, she thought of fear as a dagger. She watched it become a stalactite, slender and sharp, and then pierce her chest. Time and time again fear tore her apart, and silver blood leaked from her shattered skin, glistening against the darkness, forming a perfectly oval puddle at her feet, like a mirror: it was pain. Stratifications of liquid pain that suddenly rose before her eyes, higher and higher, shaped like peaks towers minarets, higher and higher, towards a sky beaded with electric stars, and the pain wouldn’t stop spiraling like madness, like a city of spikes of ice, the Starry City, the City of Pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Starry City

 

** 01\. The Starry City **

** [teenage years] **

  


It’s like a silver disk suspended in the middle of nowhere. Neon stars shine upon staggering heights, the streets like canyons embedded in the tallest palaces.

The city is vertical, aerial, rising up into slender bridges that leap from tower to tower. Its roots run deep, the alleys are dark and crowded with the shadows of miles of ivory steel glass that climb all the way up there.

The city is uninhabited, silence spreading from the corners of its streets; a warning. Only a slow hum, in the background, like a giant mechanism.

If she tries to count the steps that lead to the Observatory – the central building, the tallest, cut into an hexagonal shape, bathed in a light so sharp it blinds – it’ll take her more or less fifteen minutes, through the Galleries, the Hall of Trophies and of Heroes, the Arches, the suspended Garden and so on until the Never Ending Staircase, white rising against the abyss of the sky.

She’s lost count by the time she enters the Observatory, but it doesn’t matter; on the polished floor the lights shimmer like flowers and she breathes slowly, so slowly, and her thoughts are scarce and grim fear evaporates from her body, featherlight, as she sinks in the middle of the room, her arms wide.

The sky’s dome rotates slowly upon her; from afar she feels the pulsing of the mechanism,  it’s blood under closed eyelids , she thinks.

The paneled ceiling flutters for a couple of seconds when Elsa opens her eyes. Her bedroom is half-lit, the corners are dyed blue.

Her heart is beating quietly under her jacket, no longer in her throat with her nausea. She slowly frees a hand from under an armpit to touch the covers: wet, but not frozen.

Elsa inhales so deeply until it hurts, until tears don’t smudge slowly the slope of her icy cheeks.

  



	2. The Mysterious Stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized I have to make some necessary clarifications.  
> 1) My King is a protogeek.  
> 2) VERY IMPORTANT: the song that plays throughout the whole story is Offenbach’s Barcarolle/Belle Nuit.  
> 3) The chapters are NOT in chronological order. They can be considered fragments of Elsa’s childhood, teenage years, young adulthood and adulthood. I’ll be writing down in what time the chapter takes place so it’ll be easier to keep up with the story.  
> 4) The fic’s taking an… odd twist. Like, really odd (but I assure you I’m not high or anything!). Just hold on a bit longer, from next chapter on we’ll start dancing/waltzing/tangoing/whatever with Hans! Maybe. And that should get things back on track (?). And it might increase the rating a little bit too…  
> 5) This fic owes a lot to way too many cultural and literary references, but I’ll be putting them all in the ending notes!
> 
> As always, dreamswanderer translated this fanfiction from Italian. <3

**The Mysterious Stranger**

**[childhood]**

  


A stranger has come to Arendelle’s castle. They say he comes from South, from far, far away, but he might come from the neighboring village that he would still be an extremely welcomed surprise: it’s been years since there have been guests in the castle.

He came in with the last ship for this season (it’s late November already) with a load of some things we were actually expecting for May – mostly tapestries porcelains and books. He asked to stay as guest in the castle as a reward for the early shipment.

Elsa’s locked herself in her room ever since.

She’s spotted him through her window: he’s short. He was clad in black and he was wearing a funny pair of dark glasses. All in all, a nasty appearance.

When her mother hands her the books later that day, her dislike for the stranger only grows: the pictorial books she was impatiently waiting for isn’t there. Instead of it, an unknown title, in French, that she throws on the bed out of irritation.

“You should be happy that they got here months early, instead of throwing such a tantrum.”

“He didn’t bring me the Grimm brother’s book!”

“We’ll have someone get it with the next ship.”

“In six months!” Elsa whispers, wringing her hands.

She stares at the thrown-open book among the pillows for a long moment.

“He’s short and nasty.” she hisses, her face scrunched.

“Oh, Elsa…”

“I don’t like him, and I don’t like his stupid-“

The Queen doesn’t have the time to extend her hand for a touch that the child has already retreated, her eyes alert.

Her mother looks at her with that crease in her brow that those who are getting older because of worries have. She lowers her hand, which she had left suspended in hesitance, slowly.

“What would you like for dinner, dear?” she asks her after painting an equally bitter smile on her face.

  
*

 

She has eaten all the meatballs and potatoes long ago (leaving the tray on the bed) and she’s focused on the translation of the first pages of the French book when something strange happens. Something really strange.

Music, suddenly. Her gaze fixes itself to the door. It’s music, as if there were many, many players, down in the hall in which her parents are dining with the stranger.

_Are they throwing him a party?_ she wonders as she snaps the book close and sneaks towards the door.

Her heart beats furiously when she hears that laughters have mixed with the music.

She slowly returns to her bed, she throws the book off and she snuffs out the candle. From the window she sees the reflection of the lights of the castle, a streak of gold in the darkness of her little room. Elsa allows herself to be lulled by the dancing light against the wall. She falls asleep thinking of the stranger’s round glasses.

*

  
The following morning her father coaxed her into coming down for breakfast. Elsa was reluctant, but when he began to do her hair himself, in spirits so high like she’s never seen, she couldn’t help but letting him drag her down the corridors.

You’ll see, you’ll see! Such a thing… I’ve never seen anything like it!

As they enter the breakfast room, Elsa immediately recognizes the stranger: he’s sitting at the table and he’s digging into the hardboiled eggs.

[N/A: the following dialogues were spoken in French] 

“Monsieur Valdi, allow me to introduce you to my eldest daughter, Elsa.”

Elsa hesitates on the threshold while the King makes his way towards the man, smiling.

The stranger wipes his mouth before rising and stepping towards her: the lenses of his glasses twinkle for a moment as the rosy light of morning flashes onto them.

“So this is the famous Princess Elsa! Your parents have told me about you, signorina.”

He’s curtsied deeply, bending until he’s at the same eye-level of the little girl. She’s nervously wringing her hands, her eyes darting between the man standing in front of her and her father.

“Come on, Elsa.” he says, smiling still. “Say hello to monsieur.”

“I greet you, monsieur, and I hope with all my heart that your staying here is as pleasant as can be…”

“What a wonderful French, signorina!” he repeats that Italian word.

“She’s our studious one.” the King comments, pleased, as he gestures to a chair next to the table. “Come and eat, darling.”

Elsa’s trembling as she seats, her cheeks red for having remembered the proper official welcoming sentence without tripping over her words, and for the compliment. Her heart is beating as furiously as that of someone who’s just passed a test of bravery: it’s been years since she’s talked to a stranger.

She digs into the porridge served to her so quickly she almost laughs.

“While the other one…”

The “other one” makes her entrance right then in her mother’s arms, still half asleep.

As soon as she sees her older sister oddly sitting at the table, “Elsa!” she starts shouting.

“Anna, leave your sister alone. Anna! What do we say when he have guests?”

The child watches her mother with puzzlement, then the black clad man waving at her.

“Hi.”

And she resumes pulling at the Queen’s collar: “I wanna sit next to Elsa. Please please please…”

“Leave your sister alone. There.”

“Mama!”

“Forgive her, she’s a feisty one.”

“Don’t worry!”

“Monsieur Valdi” the King resumes, who’s sitting in front of the stranger, “I don’t mean to be insistent, but I would like you to talk about that device you have showed us last night.”

“Ah, of course! I’d love to. But the signorina here hasn’t seen it yet: we must right this immediately.”

Elsa could swear she caught a glimpse of a wink directed to her from behind the dark lenses.

“Don’t bother-“

“No bother. Come!”

He’s standing next to a small table, on which he places a most strange gadget. Elsa draws close, dragged by her father’s excitement. It’s some kind of horn set onto a wooden box.

“You’ll see, Elsa, you’ll see!” the King repeats.

The stranger has taken some kind of thin black wheel from his bag, which he places in the middle of the contrivance. He begins to spin more and more quickly some kind of handle, similar to those of coffee grinders, until the wheel doesn’t spin by itself. Valdi carefully places a metallic arm on the wheel, paying even more attention as he positions the pin at its end… and the horn suddenly explodes with music.

“Don’t worry, Elsa, don’t worry. Listen…”

Her father has bent down next to her, holding her shoulders to calm her.

Music fills the room, as if a whole orchestra was contained into the box, whith its strings, its woodwinds and whatsoever.

Elsa stares at the whole in the horn, her eyes wide.

“How does it…?”

“Ah, excellent question. The most excellent question of all!” the stranger says, shouting to make himself heard, his eyebrows arching above the frame of his glasses. He’s rocking from one leg onto the other, his arms behind his back.

“I don’t have the slightest idea.” he answers her, and in that moment the music starts to come in long waves instead of dancing to the volatile strings.

“Belle nuit, o nuit d’amour!” the stranger sings in his pleasant tenor’s voice, his accent so thick it makes even Elsa giggle, who suddenly feels herself being picked up.

“Papa! Papa, no!” she shrieks as she tries to break free, but the King holds her against her chest as he dances across the living room.

“It’s okay, Elsa. Just grant a dance to this old king.”

The little girl lets him swing her around as she tries not to touch him at all, her hands cradled against her chest but her forehead resting on his shoulder.

When the song is over and she’s set back on her chair, Elsa feels her forehead burning up and her eyes stinging.

“What a wonderful gadget! I don’t know what I’d give to have it!”

“For your kingdom, Sire, I might decide to give it up.”

The stranger is putting the disk back into his bag.

“What do you say, darling. Have you heard monsieur?” the King laughs, sitting back somewhat out of breath.

“You’ll have to ask Elsa: she’s the future Queen.”

The King’s conspiratorial eyes settle on a still shaken Elsa.

“So, Elsa? Shall we settle on such a reckless decision? Shall we give the kingdom in exchange of this musical device?”

There’s a warm atmosphere, and it’s been forever since cheerfulness entered this home. The child still feels the warmth from her father’s hands on her back. She slightly nods her agreement.

“Well, it’s decided!” he exclaims clapping his hands. “The I’ll hand the key of Arendelle to you!”

“I’m afraid” the stranger says, terribly serious. “That unfortunately it won’t be enough: I’m too attached to this gadget. And I do have to complete my journey.”

“Where are you going?”

Elsa’s question is barely a squeal.

“I would like to make it to Cape Nordkinn before fall. They say it’s the Northernmost point of Europe. You know, signorina, I’ve left Italy on foot almost a luster ago, from Orvieto to be precise.”

“What’s a luster?”

“That’s five years, dear. Now say goodbye, the teacher’s waiting.”

“Mama!”

“Come on Anna. Say goodbye.”

Anna and the Queen noisily leave the living room. The light floods the room violently, coming from the tall windows: the Sun has already risen, bright against the sky of the same colors of the fjord.

“Why did you leave?”

Elsa stares into the reflections of the glasses, as green as an odd bug’s armor.

“Because I’m a collector, darling. I collect landscapes and cities.”

“Cities? But how…?”

And the stranger pours a sea of papers and leaflets on the table, and they flutter everywhere on the ground on the cutlery between the glasses.

“It’s just a part of my collection, the most unrefined one.”

“These are… it’s not possible. Are these paintings?” the King asks as he leafs through the papers, taken aback entirely.

“Not at all. They’re called daguerrotypes. It’s one of the devices I own that takes them: you see, the sunlight leaves an impression on the film and it- well, honestly I’m not entirely sure of the chemical processes that happen in there.”

“A device… extraordinary!” the King exclaims, still leafing through the photographs.

“If you’d like to see it, Sire, you can go to my ship and ask to let you inspect it. I’ll meet you there as soon as…” and he gestures towards the mess on the table.

“Of course! You can’t possibly now how grateful I am to you for this opportunity.”

The King leaves in long strides, almost running.

Elsa takes a handful of photographs: cities, hills, seas, people working in the countryside, and then cities again, all entangled on her living room table.

It feels like her heart is in her throat.

“You have been to all these places?”

“Of course. I had left with the intention of creating a catalogue of the most beautiful sights of Europe: Paris, Vienna, Florence, Lyons, and so on. The world is changing fast, signorina: I wanted to portray it before it was too late. But as I went I realized that I had started my journey when it was too late already.”

He pushes some photographs towards her: endless rows of low black roofs, the sky darkened by thick smoke.

“London.”

Young boys – same age as she – looking emaciated and terribly dirty as they stand tall in front of a squalid building. “East End Factory” the sign behind them says.

“They’re all factories. This is the river Thames. I assure you, its color is not that different.”

“What’s this?”

A vast road is torn from side to side by the uprooted pavement: towers of objects reach for the sky, leaning against the buildings.

“Ah! Paris’ barricades, last year’s July.”

“As you can see, the quest for the queen of all cities, the most beautiful of all, has failed: I moved too late. Or maybe it never existed.”

The stranger’s smile is enigmatic.

“I… I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be! I’ve walked so many places and seen so many things, that I’ve become some kind of encyclopedia myself. But what really matters, signorina, is that the real sense of my journey is that in every city town village I’ve seen potential. Wasted potential, in most cases, but that in time has spun a web in my memories: I haven’t found my ideal city anywhere, and yet it was everywhere, merged in every place. A tower in London, and arch in Paris, the cobblestone of a German city, and so on, and I’ve pursued my invisible city, piecing it together brick by brick.”

Elsa stares at him, still. She’s not even sure those words really came out of the stranger’s mouth.

“Invisible cities?”

“Of course, Elsa. Everyone has an invisible city. It couldn’t be otherwise. The upside down reverse of our dreams can’t exist out there.”

“Is it a riddle?”

“No.”

“Are… are you the Mad Hatter? Like the one in Alice’s book?”

“No, but it’s a character I can identify with.”

Not a sound.

Suddenly Elsa lights up.

“So the French book, “Oneiric Architecture”, is yours? It’s… you wrote it! It describes a strange city, and infinite city, so tall that-“

The stranger raises a finger to his lips and Elsa falls silent. His glasses are shining as bright as ever.

“There’s no place for that city out here, not even among words. Only in here.” he says, tapping on his temple.

“You can keep it, if you want. I don’t need it anymore. Take is as a refund for the Grimm’s.”

Elsa swallows, she feels a lump in her throat. _Which could be my invisible city?_

“And North? Why are you going North?” she asks, her voice a whisper.

“I’m hunting horizons. I want my city to have a steely horizon, like the sea is up there, ice cold. Only at the end of the world I could find such a horizon.”

“And then? Where will you go?”

The stranger’s smile is mysterious.

“Who knows.”

 

*

  


He had left months ago when Elsa understands what an invisible city is. She had read and reread the French book: it was a compilation of foreshortened vies, of memories, of sketches and drawings, splinters of places the author had gathered because they had struck him as he traveled. When she reads it for the second time she understands it that it’s not a casual series, nor is the disposition of those fragments: together they outline a city that feels like a circus, a bit of a pavilion and a bit of a ferris wheel, noisy and nocturnal, irradiated with “electric” (or so they’re called) lights. But most importantly, and this she understands only at the end, the invisible city is the author, his faithful reflection. From all of those views radiates the same feeling of aged cheerfulness.

He’s gone almost a year ago, when the starry city begins to take shape within Elsa. One night, during a more violent attack, as she felt the ice climbing the walls in the darkness and as blood roared in her years, she thought of fear as a dagger. She watched it become a stalactite, slender and sharp, and then pierce her chest. Time and time again fear tore her apart, and silver blood leaked from her shattered skin, glistening against the darkness, forming a perfectly oval puddle at her feet, like a mirror: it was pain. Stratifications of liquid pain that suddenly rose before her eyes, higher and higher, shaped like peaks towers minarets, higher and higher, towards a sky beaded with electric stars, and the pain wouldn’t stop spiraling like madness, like a city of spikes of ice, the starry city, the city of pain.

She stared at it in awe as it rose above her, blinding in the excessively bright light. The storm had passed. Only white peace all around.

She walked the first steps of an endless staircase that climbed some tower up there. Her breath came out evenly once more. It wasn’t cold anymore.

She shaped it in years, with inexhaustible patience, and every time she went back to it to escape fear.

The starry city was a desert of ice.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Random notes of cultural nature:  
> a) The book written by the stranger really is Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”.  
> b) The Mysterious Stranger is based both on Hoffman’s Sandman and on one of Poe’s characters.  
> c) Gramophone and daguerrotype (the prototype of a camera) have been invented way after 1830, in which the fic is supposed to be set. But the fic doesn’t give a damn about history, so there.  
> d) French was the common tongue used in Central Europe in the 1800s, but I’m not sure that held true in Norway as well. I’ll pretend it did.

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction has been translated from Italian by the amazing [dreamswanderer](http://dreamswanderer.tumblr.com/) (grazie grazie grazie GRAZIE mille!)


End file.
